In recent years, touch panels have been increasingly adopted for terminal devices including a mobile phone terminal, a high performance-type mobile information terminal having a conversation function, what is referred to as a smart phone, a tablet-type terminal, and so forth, as input devices for which users perform an operation input. The touch panel is a device including a display unit displaying an image, etc. and a position input device such as a touch sensor, which are integrated into one body.
In a terminal device including a touch panel, specified operations are input by a user to various icons that are displayed on the screen of the display unit, for example, so that application software (hereinafter often abbreviated to “application”) executes. The application is associated with the icon, and performs an operation in accordance with the details of the operation input. As operation input methods, a tap operation achieved by tapping the screen, a drag operation achieved by moving an indicator including a touched finger, a stylus pen, etc. from a specified position to a different position, a flick operation achieved by moving the finger or the indicator on the screen in such a way to make a quick sweeping stroke, a tap operation achieved by tapping the screen, and so forth have been available.
The various operations are determined based on, for example, information about a coordinate position defined on the screen where a finger of the user or the indicator touches or approaches, which is attained during a series of operations performed from when the finger or the indicator touches the screen to when the finer or the indicator leaves the screen. Specifically, information about, for example, the amount of a change in the coordinate position per unit time, the moving speed of the coordinate position, an area on the screen where a touch is detected, etc. is used as information specifying the details of an operation input.
Then, in the mobile terminal device, a shift to a suspend state which is a power saving mode is made when there is no operation input from the user over a fixed time period, so as to reduce the power consumption. In the suspend state, the light amount of backlight of the display unit is reduced, or various functions are stopped to reduce the power consumption. However, since the details of an operation input performed before making the shift to the suspend state, etc. are stored in a memory, processing can be started again by reading the details of the operation input, etc. from the memory after waking up from the suspend state (referred to as “wakeup”). In the following description, processing performed to wake up from the suspend state is referred to as “resuming”.
FIGS. 17A and 17B are schematic diagrams illustrating an exemplary external configuration of a known mobile terminal device 100. FIG. 17A illustrates an exemplary operation performed to wake up the mobile terminal device 100 from the suspend state, and FIG. 17B illustrates an example where an application is started through resuming and icons, etc. are displayed on a display unit 102.
The mobile terminal device 100 includes a touch panel 101, the display unit 102 superimposed on the touch panel 101, and a home button 103 provided to display a home screen image. When the mobile terminal device 100 is in the suspend state, a se performs an operation by pressing the home button 103 with a finger (See FIG. 17A). When the mobile terminal device 100 wakes up through resuming, the home screen image is displayed on the display unit 102 (see FIG. 17B). One the home screen image, lists of various types of video, functional icons are displayed.
Further, the method of starting the operation of a device by detecting an operation performed on the touch panel has also become available. For example, in Patent Literature 1, the method of shifting a device to a user-interface unlocked state when a contact with a touch sensitive display corresponds to a specified gesture is disclosed.